The US president has slammed the FBI for "blaming" South Korean tech giant Samsung for 50,000 missing text messages between top FBI agent Peter Strzok, who has been involved in both the Hillary Clinton email probe and FBI Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, and lawyer Lisa Page, who were in a relationship and had criticized Donald Trump while he was still a presidential hopeful.
However, The Hill apparently wrongly understood the US president's words and shared on Twitter an article titled "Trump blames Samsung for missing text messages between FBI agents critical of Trump." The headline was apparently rewritten later when the error was spotted, as the article was then updated at 11:20 p.m. local time. The new headline says "Trump appears to call out Samsung over missing FBI text messages."
On January 22, the US Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee said the FBI recently admitted it had failed to preserve the text messages exchanged between FBI counterintelligence official Strzok and his mistress, FBI lawyer Page.
Twitter users have been quick to react to Trump's remark and the US media report that falsely reported the president's message.
However, some Twitter users apparently also thought that the US president has accused the South Korean tech giant for the missing texts.
The text messages were sent between December 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017, a critical period in the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia, which Strzok was picked to oversee in July 2016. However, according to media reports, Trump has overstated the number of the missing text messages as their total number of 50,000, while hundreds have already been released.
During the five-month period, Strzok interviewed then- National Security Adviser Michael Flynn about his contacts with Russia’s Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, the Trump dossier was published and James Comey was fired as FBI director.
Strzok and Page were members of the Special Counsel’s Office, but Strzok was removed in July after the Justice Department discovered his anti-Trump exchanges with Page.